For most of the party’s brief existence, that stamp of approval for the governor would hardly qualify as a surprise. Cuomo, after all, created the WEP in 2014 and subsequently fought to retain control over it. | AP Photo

Women’s Equality Party, under new management, still likes Cuomo

ALBANY — As speculation mounts about actress Cynthia Nixon's possible challenge to Gov. Andrew Cuomo this year, the chairwoman of the Women’s Equality Party says it's very likely the party will support Cuomo's reelection bid.

“Anybody who wants to be interviewed for our line and wants to fill out a questionnaire, we’re open, we’re going to consider everybody,” said the chairwoman, Susan Zimet, before pointing to the governor's “Women’s Equality Agenda," pieces of which have been passed and which Cuomo is trying to expand.

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“He’s actually even drilling down further and bringing more issues to the forefront on behalf of women’s issues," she said, "and so if he keeps delivering the way he’s delivering and he keeps the focus on making women’s lives better, I honestly don’t see why we wouldn’t want to endorse him.”

For most of the party’s brief existence, that stamp of approval for the governor would hardly qualify as a surprise. Cuomo, after all, created the WEP in 2014 and subsequently fought to retain control over it.

The WEP, however, is under new management. Zimet became its chairwoman this winter, and there's nothing in her history to suggest she’s the type who would automatically do the governor’s bidding. In her previous capacity as New Paltz’s supervisor, she was often at the center of protests against the governor’s perceived hesitancy to ban fracking. (He eventually did.) As executive director of the Hunger Action Network of New York State, she hasn’t held back from criticizing actions by Cuomo that conflict with her group’s anti-poverty agenda.

In her new role with the WEP, Zimet promised that the party will be more active and energetic than it has been.

“We don’t plan on being quiet,” she said. “I didn’t take over as chair just to keep this party sort of chugging chugging chugging, just to be there for the people who needed it. I took over with the goal and the commitment to build this party, to build this movement and to let people understand that we have a ballot line.”

Cuomo created the party in the middle of his 2014 reelection campaign. At the time, it was widely derided as a political ploy. The Nation magazine wrote that the governor’s “attempt to hijack feminism for his own petty ends is such a craven move it could have been dreamed up by the scriptwriters at VEEP.” The New York Daily News noted design similarities between the Women’s Equality Express bus Cuomo toured in and a Tampax box.

Some observers suggested that Cuomo founded the party as a response to his feud with the Working Families Party. A party line that appears on ballots as “WEP," the thinking went, might siphon off votes from people intending to support the WFP.

Nonetheless, Cuomo wound up with 53,802 votes on its line. That was enough to ensure that it became an official party for the next four years, meaning it would have primaries and automatic ballot access and appear on voter registration forms.

Soon, however, it faced a legal fight over whether Cuomo’s allies could continue to control it. In separate bids, former state Sen. Cecilia Tkaczyk and a group of Western New York Republicans claimed leadership after arguing that the party's existing rules were flawed.

“Clearly, this was a party that was created by Cuomo for his own personal political agenda, and I didn’t think women needed to be told what to do by a man,” Tkaczyk said last week. “I went to court to try to wrest control of the party from him and to put it in the hands of actual Women’s Equality Party members.”

Courts ultimately shot down both of the challenges. Rules authorized by Cuomo and Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul were held to be valid, and Rachel Gold, a former counsel in the governor’s office, remained the party’s chairwoman.

Gold stepped down last year, however, and handed the reins to Zimet, who has been involved since its formal inception.

“Last summer, I got asked to go onto the executive committee as a secretary,” she recounted. “So I was the secretary, and during that period I was convening a lot of the meetings because the chair, Rachel, was very busy with other things, so I was handling a lot of the meetings. So I was sort of the one driving the train, keeping things going, in a sense."

For a few months, Zimet served as both acting chairwoman and secretary, essentially meaning she had the sole authority to convene meetings to deal with party business. At a reorganization meeting earlier this year, she was officially made chairwoman, and the other executive posts were reassigned.

The party didn't exactly become inactive after Cuomo won his second term. In 2015, for example, 98 candidates with the WEP's endorsement received about 2 percent of their vote on its line, according to a POLITICO analysis. It’s impossible to know how many voters would have supported the candidates in question even if they didn’t have a particular third party’s blessing. But it’s possible to imagine the line making a difference in the occasional close election.

That being said, the WEP has essentially been dormant when it comes to actively campaigning for the candidates it backs. Over the course of its existence, the party’s regular fundraising committee has only raised $74,500 ($67,000 of which came from men), all of which came before the 2014 election. At last accounting, it had only $1,632 in the bank and owed $42,230.

A second committee, which can’t spend money directly on elections, has raised $50,541 over the past two years, $50,000 of which came from Rockefeller heiress Lucy Waletzky. It currently owes $105,018. The vast majority of that debt was run up as Cuomo’s personal campaign committee loaned it $100,000 in the midst of the legal battles determining whether his allies could continue to control it.

“I find no infrastructure whatsoever with this party, and I just find it offensive,” said Tkaczyk, who still is an enrolled member but says she’s never been contacted about party activities.

Zimet acknowledges that the WEP is still just a “small little party” that’s not at the point where it can hold public conventions yet, but says it’s working on expanding. Currently there are only 3,603 registered members, but she anticipates activity this summer that could expand those numbers, and says that committee members are developing fundraising plans.

The path forward, Zimet believes, entails setting up the WEP as something distinct from the Democratic Party.

“While I know that the Democrats believe in women’s issues and support women’s issues, it’s still one of the many issues,” she said. “I want us to look through the prism of, how does the environment affect women? How does income inequality affect women? How does domestic violence affect women? How does voting rights affect women?”

As it works to expand, its future will most likely still involve Cuomo. Zimet says she hasn’t spoken to the governor since she took over, but acknowledged that he still has “an interest where the party’s going and what the party’s doing.” This is due in part to the fact that they’re still mutually dependent on each other: Cuomo would certainly take whatever additional votes he might receive by having the line, and the party will need to receive 50,000 votes again to remain an official party in the next gubernatorial election. That task would be more difficult if it backs a fringe candidate rather than the Democratic nominee.

“It's to our advantage for us to both need each other,” Zimet said. “But at the end of the day, it’s the party that’s running the party. Once the party was created … it’s the state committee that makes the decisions of what we do and what we don’t do, and we’re the only ones who can make the decisions for the party, but that’s not to say that obviously we don’t honor [Cuomo] for creating it.”

To some critics, this is a sign that the party could still be the governor’s political tool. "The governor spent a lot of money creating the party and keeping control of it through the courts, so I doubt that he’s really relinquishing control," Tkaczyk said.

But Zimet says that despite the past criticism, she believes the governor deeply cares about the party’s feminist goals.

“When I saw him speak on the Women’s Equality Agenda, I actually felt it was the most passionate, most committed thing that I ever heard him speak on,” she said. “I really felt he was coming from his heart about this issue and spoke like I never saw him speak on other issues. I just felt there was a really good connection, and when he talked about his daughters, it really seemed he meant it.”